


catching bullets in our teeth

by acorrespondence



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Old Guard (Movie 2020) Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Homophobia, Immortality, M/M, Magical Realism, Moral Ambiguity, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:41:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28196358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acorrespondence/pseuds/acorrespondence
Summary: The first time it happens, they’re in the mine, sent down beneath the hills to pull Harlan’s black teeth.
Relationships: Boyd Crowder/Raylan Givens
Comments: 4
Kudos: 39





	catching bullets in our teeth

**Author's Note:**

> Hello 10 fellow Justified fans! I hope you enjoy this humble offering. No knowledge of The Old Guard is required, but it might make reading a little more fun. If you have seen the movie, I fudged the immortality rules a bit, so that they dream through each other’s eyes rather than dreaming about one another. I think it works better thematically and plot-wise for this particular story (though don’t allow this statement to fool you into thinking there’s much in the way of real plot, here). This was supposed to be a short series of vignettes, and the style hasn’t changed much even as the length has increased, so I’ve decided to split it up into three parts. The first part will be the shortest.
> 
> There’s one instance of self-harm not directly related to immortality, the rest are all sort of products of how the characters’ personalities interact with the idea of living forever. Violence is on par with Justified, and well under par for The Old Guard.
> 
> I was not the only one to come up with this au idea. I got this idea immediately after watching the movie, and Togina and dancinbutterfly apparently had similar thoughts in parallel to mine. So shoutout to them for any and all input, and for engaging with my rambling. Title comes from Tunng’s “Bullets,” which is one of the incredibly apt Raylan/Boyd songs collected by Togina and supplied by their Tumblr friends. I hope you enjoy!

The first time it happens, they’re in the mine, sent down beneath the hills to pull Harlan’s black teeth. It comes without warning. Sudden, like a gag reflex. They go too deep, maybe, poke and prod with their pickaxes miles beneath the mountain, like fingers stuck down a throat. Invading like illness that the mountain expels. Raylan will find out, later, that Boyd’s been taking pay under the table to rob the pillars—dangerous and illegal work, but lucrative. Boyd’s drawn in by all three. They put in timber props to hold the roof up, but something must have shifted and the roof is coming down, the shaft around them writhing like a wounded serpent. Loose stones jump around their feet as the whole mountain shakes, and a great rumbling, as from an enormous stomach, rises from the deep. They run up the throat of it hand in hand, straining toward the sky, but Harlan closes her mouth. She swallows them whole, Saturn devouring his children.

Boyd Crowder and Raylan Givens die down a mine in 1930, two nineteen year old kids buried under a thousand tons of rock and earth, their deaths one among countless grievances against the mines leading up to the strikes.

Raylan and Boyd die down a doghole mine in 1930, but they don’t stay that way. They die inside the mountain, closing dark around them like a womb, and from it they’re reborn.

...

Boyd wakes up, five pints of his own blood soaking into his clothes and the dirt around him but the skin of his head unbroken, and he digs Raylan out of the rubble. 

He feels around for his helmet, first, too scared to light a match. The lamp is smashed, but the bulb still runs when he flips the switch on the battery around his waist. It’s a relief to see the light, chasing away that strange darkness, deeper than sleep, that clung to him as he woke. He digs for hours—splits his knuckles over and over again against the rock, though he barely feels it—until he shifts a small boulder to find Raylan’s sightless eyes staring blindly upwards, half his skull caved in. He scrambles back away from the body, lifting a plume of coal dust all around him and blackening his hands, then turns and throws up all over the mineshaft floor. 

He keeps going until his shoulders hit the wall of the shaft. Nowhere else to go, he sits like a stunned child and waits to join Raylan, as he always must. He thinks about going over to put the rocks back where they fell, and then lie down beside Raylan and bury himself—their bones resting in the same grave while above their mothers cry over empty caskets—but he can’t bring himself to approach.

The rocks shift, likely resettling where Boyd dug them up. He starts to imagine he can hear Raylan’s breath across the tunnel, and thinks he must be getting close.

“What the fuck.” 

Boyd looks up, and Raylan is sitting up and staring at him, skull intact. He squints against Boyd’s headlamp. 

“Are you _crying?_ ”

Boyd closes his eyes and refuses to believe it, muttering about ghosts and head wounds and methane accumulations that fool the eye, cloud the mind, until Raylan comes over to call him an asshole and kick him in the shin. Boyd takes his hands off his eyes and looks down at the backs of them, covered in blood but without a scratch on them. He thinks of the puddle of blood he woke up in. He should be dead, and Raylan should, too. But then, the dead in Harlan never did rest. 

...

Raylan doesn’t talk about it, but right before he wakes up under a pile of rubble, he dreams of seeing his own skull split wide open.

...

They die seven times down in the dark: twice of starvation and three times suffocation; once under the falling rocks of a second cave-in, rattling through the shaft like an aftershock while they’re trying to dig through the rubble. 

The fifth time, Boyd lights a match. Raylan doesn’t speak to him for what feels like days. The explosion is something to see, but when Boyd wakes it feels like burning up all over again, watching Raylan cry helplessly as his eyelids grow back, excruciatingly slow, no way to close his eyes against the pain. 

Boyd hates watching Raylan die slow, hates knowing what’s coming but not knowing quite when. This is infinitely worse. His penance, for thinking he can strike a match and sear his brand on Death’s back.

When they haven’t been dying, they’ve been sleeping, or fucking. But after that, Raylan doesn’t let Boyd touch him. Boyd feels like he’s going crazy, Raylan with his closed mouth nothing more than a waking dream, curled up six feet down the wall, untouchable. He starts to think maybe he was right from the first. Raylan only breaks on both counts when Boyd starts dripping battery acid on his own hands, and then suddenly Raylan won’t _stop_ touching him, won’t stop screaming at him. Boyd wants to cry with the relief of it. They fall asleep curled around each other on the ground, Raylan all screamed out, and the skin of Boyd’s hands as smooth as the day he was born. 

...

While they sleep, they dream of strangers. They’ve lived in Harlan all their lives, and when they’ve dreamed of other places they were hazy and half-formed, a wish more than a vision. But the buildings and fields and faces of these dreams are crystal clear.

...

They never do manage to dig themselves out. It’s not the mine sending men down to find their bodies that finally frees them, but a ragged-looking man coming to scavenge any scraps of coal loosed by the collapse. The mine cuts their losses and leaves them buried with the dead.

It turns out, when the roof came down, they’d been less than fifty yards from the light.

...

They wait until the man goes on his way before they leave the mine, burnt and bloody, two dead boys stepping out into the sunshine. 

...

“We should just go,” says Raylan. They’re out in Brogie Holler, in the woods behind Bo’s hunting cabin. Raylan’s cleaning his boots with a wet cloth, blood and coal dust staining the fabric and staining his hands. When he wrings it out, the water runs an ugly, grayed-out pink.

Boyd looks up from the creek he’s wading in. “How we gonna get anywhere like this, Raylan? We got no money. We ain’t got no good clothes.”

Raylan shrugs. “Ain’t like we haven’t starved to death before.”

Boyd wants to make him bleed again. Wants something to point to, to say _Look at this. This is what you are,_ the water wrung from Raylan’s cloth already swallowed by Harlan’s hungry soil, Raylan’s blood running down like a Eucharist. 

Boyd wants Raylan to kiss him. Wants to bite him, and feel Raylan flinch against him at the realization of a split lip. Wants to feel the cut as it closes against his tongue.

He sighs and makes his way back to the bank. “Where the hell we gonna go, Raylan?”

...

The first one to find them calls himself Shelby Parlow. Raylan knows him from his dreams.

Shelby finds them in Boyd’s daddy’s cabin in Bulletville, and they still flinch a little when he pulls a pocket knife and snaps it open. He tells them to sit down. They don’t.

He cuts himself. It bleeds, and then it stops bleeding. The skin comes back together before their eyes, scabbing and shrinking and then shrinking further, and it’s hard to determine the exact moment it disappears—growing smaller and smaller until it becomes too small to see. 

They sit their asses down.

There are other people like them, Shelby says. People who die, and die, and live to die again. He used to travel with a group of them who call themselves the Guard, easy to pass off—The National Guard, people assume when they hear it, or some kind of security detail. And sometimes, that’s what they are. Other times they’re the ones from whom others need to be guarded. But they do what they think is right.

Boyd stares at him from his place at the table. His fingers are folded under his chin.

Raylan narrows his eyes. “If the Guard’s so great, why’d you leave it?”

Shelby meets his eyes. He looks, for a moment, as old as he must really be. “I got tired of dying.”

Raylan feels the words land in his belly, like stones swallowed whole.

...

Boyd looks at Raylan while Shelby talks. He has a hundred faraway places reflected in his eyes, a life spooling out before him like a road through mountains that spits out at the sea. Boyd thinks, on the inside, he’s already gone.

...

Raylan wants to go. To leave Harlan and its teeth and its stubborn survival behind him. He wants to run and keep running, just to prove to himself that the world isn’t flat, doesn’t drop off sharp at the edge of Harlan County, with every soul who ever tried to flee lying dead at the bottom.

Boyd doesn’t.

They argue about it in the bedroom of the cabin, Shelby on the other side of a closed door.

“You know why I can’t,” says Boyd. “I got my daddy, and Bowman.”

“They think we’re dead, Boyd!” Raylan shouts. His throat aches like he’s been shouting for hours, the weight of tears pressing heavy at the back of it, like a boot on his neck. It hurts him, to think of his mama and Helen at his funeral, praying over an empty box—or pretending to pray, on Aunt Helen’s part, because Raylan thinks she’s too angry at God to ask Him any favors. 

He doesn’t care if Arlo thinks he’s dead. If Raylan’s daddy thinks he’s dead, he won’t think to come looking.

Raylan’s words are like physical things scattered on the floor between them, falling the way his tears won’t. _We’re dead, dead, dead._

Boyd looks at him sideways. “But we ain’t.”

Only, Raylan’s not so sure.

He lays his hands on Boyd’s shoulders and looks him in the eye. 

“This is the only chance we’re ever gonna get.”

Boyd looks back. His eyes are close together and set deep, brown and green mottled together like camouflage, and dark under the shadow of his brow. Sometimes Raylan looks into them, and he can’t see anything at all. 

Raylan shakes him. “God, why won’t you just _leave?”_

Boyd shakes his head like an aftershock, traveling up from Raylan’s hands. “Harlan saved us, Raylan.”

Raylan laughs, loud and sharp. “Harlan killed us.” He takes a deep breath, and in it he can almost taste the salty sea air of his dreams. “There’s other places. I’ve seen ‘em in my dreams. I know that you have, too.”

“Where it feels like you’re there,” Boyd says quietly. Raylan nods, and Boyd does too, like they’re two sides of a mirror. Raylan’s not quite sure who’s the reflection. Not until Boyd smiles, white and cracked down the middle like fractured glass. “They make me homesick.”

...

Boyd never should have robbed the goddamn mine. Should have known the sturdy pillars holding the mountain up were struts undergirding his entire world. He should have remembered—cheating Harlan is the same as cheating himself.

...

Shelby has a car, and nowhere much to be. He doesn’t let them drive it, but he takes them to a town where no one knows them. Boyd buys a pocket watch, and Raylan buys a gun, and they both set these things at their hip. 

Shelby leaves when they get back to Bulletville, telling Raylan he’ll let the Guard know where to go. Raylan tells Boyd to point his daddy’s spare shotgun at his head and shoot Raylan before Raylan can shoot him.

They draw down ten thousand times, until Raylan can pull his gun faster than thought. These deaths are quick to come and quick to pass, and stop when they put the guns away. 

Raylan never gets close enough to see the holes he puts in Boyd’s head. 

When it’s him, he thinks Boyd makes himself look. He wakes up time and again to Boyd’s face hovering over his, grinning like a death’s head, the tips of his hair on fire in the fading light. 

The light here is always fading. They’re so deep in the hills that they’re stuck in perennial twilight, the sunset dogging the heels of the dawn. The nights are long and press in on them, like they’re still in the mine. Boyd takes it into himself, somehow, here and gone all at once. Liminal, somehow. Raylan thinks that even when Boyd’s dead, he’s waiting.

...

Boyd shoots Raylan, again and again and again. Even then, he doesn’t look away. This is what the mountain taught him—even killing Raylan Givens won’t get him to stay.

...

They stay in Bulletville for nearly a month, waiting on the Guard Shelby promised. In between killing each other out in the yard, Raylan is restless. The gun in his hand rises easy now—easy as pointing his finger, that old pantomime of childhood, where everyone you shoot stands back up once the game is over. He feels like he’s playing at it, still. Like he’s only a child, and this is just another game. The killing never sticks.

Raylan watches the horizon while Boyd goes inside to sit in that same chair at the table, head bowed as if in mourning. He holds his pocket watch in both hands, the edge pressed against his forehead, like he’s praying to it. Raylan comes inside with his heels itching, spinning up dust under his boots as he paces the floor and starts to think maybe Shelby’s a goddamn liar.

Boyd watches from his chair, gaze on Raylan but head still down. His eyes are so hard to see.

“It ever enter your mind, Raylan, that maybe they got a long goddamn way to travel?” he suggests one day, while Raylan’s boots scratch out a map of his frustration on the floor. “Surely America ain’t the only place in need of guarding.”

That night, Raylan fucks him like they’re both about to die, like they’re not dead already, something inside him still stuck in that moment right before the roof caved in. Boyd lets Raylan collapse on top of him afterward, like a re-enactment, where Boyd is Raylan and Raylan is the mountain.

When Boyd fucks Raylan, he presses down against him like the rocks Raylan died under. Like he’s trying to bury them both. 

His eyes are too close like this. When Raylan looks into them, he sees the outline of something, coming into focus.

Raylan closes his eyes.

...

When the car comes, Raylan kisses Boyd, hard, behind the door where no one can see. They come together just to break apart again, the way they always do, two ends of a magnet that keep switching poles.

Boyd watches the dust spin up in the wake of their tires, until they disappear behind the hill.

He can’t stay in one place, Shelby told him. He won’t age.

Boyd never did listen well to anyone outside his own head. And now that he’s met Shelby, he’s not in Boyd’s head anymore.

He’s known Raylan all his life, met him before he can remember and met him again at the bottom of a mineshaft when he saw the inside of his skull. He was born and met Raylan, he died and met Raylan. And yet, if Boyd’s skull broke open and Raylan looked into it, he’d surely see himself.

...

Raylan goes with the Guard. Boyd stays. And that should be that.

It’s not.


End file.
